Ch. 1.3. From the Townshend Revenue Act to the Quebec Act, 1767-74
Adapted from Yirush, pp. 234-43.
The Townshend Ministry and its Revenue Act (1767)
The year after repeal of the Stamp Act the Rockingham Whigs fell from power and were replaced by a new ministry under the control of Pitt. However, due to Pitt’s ill health, Charles Townshend, who had been at the Board of Trade under Halifax in the 1750s, held the reins of power as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1766 to his death in Sept., 1767). Townshend had been an advocate of parliamentary taxation of the colonies since his time at the Board.
In May 1767, Townshend secured the passage of a Revenue Act that levied duties on certain commodities imported into the colonies, among them tea, glass, lead, and paper. Townshend planned to put the monies raised from these duties toward the support of royal government in the colonies.
Moreover, the duties would be collected in America by a reorganized customs service, which included a new American Board of Customs Commissioners headquartered in Boston whose salaries would also be paid out of the duties they collected. The following year, four new vice-admiralty courts were established in the major colonial ports.
Townshend also decided to move the troops who had been guarding the Proclamation line in the west into the cities to better assert Parliament’s authority, although it was not until the Fall of 1768 that they began arriving in large numbers.
In the meantime, Parliament had reinforced the legal basis for housing troops in the coastal cities when it reacted to the New York assembly’s refusal to provide the troops in the colony with sufficient supplies, as required by the Quartering Act of 1765. Faced with this refusal, in the summer of 1767 Parliament passed the New York Restraining Act, which suspended the New York assembly. The assembly remained officially disbanded for two years, after which a compromise was finally reached.
Colonial Protest and Resistance to the Townshend Duties
Taken together, these measures revived colonial fears that Parliament intended “to destroy constitutional rights in America.” Although no pan-colonial congress met to protest Townshend’s Revenue Act, there was a widespread campaign to boycott British goods, which culminated in non-importation and non-consumption agreements enforced by local committees throughout America.
The epicenter of the resistance to these measures was Massachusetts, where, in early 1768, the assembly, at the instigation of Samuel Adams, sent a circular letter to the other colonies protesting the new duties on the grounds that “it is an essential, unalterable right in nature, engrafted into the British constitution, as a fundamental law … that what a man had honestly acquired is absolutely his own” and “cannot be taken from him without his consent.”
When the Massachusetts representatives refused to rescind the letter, Governor Francis Bernard (1760-69), under orders from Lord Hillsborough, the new secretary of state for America, dissolved the assembly (it would remain officially disbanded until 1770). Hillsborough also sent a letter to the rest of the colonial governors advising them to prorogue or dissolve their assemblies if they took any notice of this “seditious paper” that denied “the authority of Parliament” and subverted “the true principles of the constitution.”
In this context an uproar was provoked by customs officials, who in May, 1768, seized the Liberty, a ship owned by John Hancock. This incident first made Hancock, one of Boston’s wealthiest traders, well known as an opponent of British authority (though his lasting fame owes more to his later role as president of the Continental Congress when it approved the Declaration of Independence, and for being the first to sign this document). Varying reports make it difficult to disentangle what happened, but customs officials accused Hancock of having unloaded most of the Liberty‘s cargo of Madeira wine before it was inspected, so that it had to pay duties on only part of what it had carried. After initially dropping the charges, officials renewed them in June, when they again seized the ship. This time riots broke out against the customs officials, who were forced to retreat to an island fortress in Boston’s harbor. Customs officials confiscated the Liberty, but the smuggling case against Hancock himself was dropped by early 1769.
Both the dissolution of the Massachusetts assembly and the affair of the Liberty served to increase the resistance to British measures in Boston. This resistance helped to persuade British officials to send troops to Boston, where two regiments began arriving in the Fall of 1768, with two more to follow.
The most widely read response to the Townshend Acts came from the pen of John Dickinson, a Pennsylvanian lawyer, who had been a leading member of the Stamp Act Congress. In a series of twelve Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1767-68), which were published in colonial newspapers as well as in England, Dickinson argued that Parliament’s attempt to tax the colonies was unconstitutional. Drawing on Locke, Dickinson argued that “Those who are taxed without their own consent, expressed by themselves or their representatives, are slaves.”
Despite his denial of Parliament’s right to tax the colonies for revenue, Dickinson conceded to Parliament an overarching yet ill-defined legislative authority, which included a right to levy duties for the sole purpose of regulating trade. These letters made Dickinson one of the most well-known colonial political leaders. His constitutional argument, which accepted British control over maritime trade but rejected any “internal” taxation without the consent of colonial inhabitants, remained influential until the eve of the Revolution itself.
Repeal of Most of the Townshend Duties (1770)
Due to widespread opposition in the colonies, the new ministry under Prime Minister Frederick North, known as Lord North, repealed all of the Townshend duties in the spring of 1770. Only the duty on tea was kept on the books, in order to uphold Parliament’s right of taxation. Lord Hillsborough, the American secretary, told the colonies that the ministry would be no longer tax them for revenue. Hillsborough also allowed Governor Bernard to recall the Massachusetts assembly, despite the fact that they had not rescinded the circular letter.
Three years of commercial prosperity and relative calm ensued (1770-73). During this time, the settlers imported tea and paid the duty that Townshend had levied in 1767. But the Board of Customs Commissioners remained, the Royal Navy patrolled the coasts looking for smugglers, and British troops were still in Boston.
As with the repeal of the Stamp Act, a crisis had been averted but not resolved. The idea of parliamentary sovereignty still resonated in official circles in London; and even those who were sympathetic to America maintained that Parliament was the supreme legislature of the empire.
The Boston Massacre (1770)
It was in the early part of this relatively calm interlude, in the spring of 1770, that the so-called Boston Massacre occurred. In fact this was a relatively minor riot that was occasioned when a crowd taunted a small contingent of British troops, who panicked and fired into the crowd. Five locals died and the event was seized upon by critics of British rule as an example of British tyranny.
The Tea Act (May, 1773)
In May 1773, Lord North passed the Tea Act, which retained the import duty levied by Townshend in 1767 but eliminated all export duties paid on tea when it left England. The act also gave the financially troubled East India Company a monopoly on the sale of tea in the colonies. By doing so, North intended to undercut the much cheaper tea smuggled into the colonies by the Dutch, thereby increasing the Crown’s revenues as well as the profitability of the East India Company.
The Boston Tea Party (Dec., 1773)
Convinced that this was yet another attempt at parliamentary taxation, committees of correspondence across the colonies organized protests; and in late 1773, as the first shipments arrived, mobs pressured the consignees and the ship captains to turn around without landing the tea. However, in Boston, Governor Hutchinson insisted that the ships remain in the harbor until they had unloaded the tea. On the night of December 16, 1773, a mob ensured that this would not happen by dumping 90,000 pounds of tea into Boston harbor.
The Coercive Acts (1774)
The ministry’s response to yet another act of resistance in Boston was swift and all-encompassing. In the spring of 1774, Parliament passed a series of four laws which became known collectively as the Coercive Acts. The first, the Boston Port Act, closed the port of Boston to all commerce until the East India Company was compensated for the loss of tea.
The second law, the Massachusetts Government Act, altered the Massachusetts charter for the first time since 1691, giving the king the power to appoint the previously elected council (the upper house of the General Court). It also allowed the governor to appoint all provincial judges and sheriffs, and limited the number of town meetings to one a year without the permission of the governor.
A third law, the Administration of Justice Act, provided for the removal out of the colony of any judge, soldier, or customs official indicted for a capital offense and unlikely to receive an impartial trial in a colonial court.
A fourth law, the Quartering Act, amended its 1765 predecessor of the same name by providing that, if a colony did not supply sufficient funds as required by the earlier law, then troops could be housed in private dwellings.
Imperial officials made General Thomas Gage, who was the commander in chief of British forces, also the civil governor of Massachusetts (May, 1774 – Oct., 1775). The former governor, Thomas Hutchinson (1769-74), having failed to maintain order in his native province, headed into a long exile in England.
The Quebec Act (1774)
In the summer of 1774, Parliament passed another law, which it considered unrelated to the troubles in Massachusetts, but which colonial leaders feared was connected. The Quebec Act finally established civil government in Quebec, but in contrast to the proposals made in the 1763 Royal Proclamation, there would be no representative assembly allowed, the Catholic church was to retain all of its rights, and French civil law would remain in force. As well, the boundaries of Quebec were to be extended into the Mississippi Valley as far south as the Ohio River. To the settlers, this was an ominous development as there would now be a new colony, lacking English constitutional government and the Protestant religion, which excluded them from the valuable lands to the west of the Appalachians.
The Collapse of Royal Authority in Massachusetts (1774)
Upon his arrival in Massachusetts in May 1774, General Gage found that his writ ran no farther than Boston, such was the opposition to the Coercive Acts in the province. He was unable to obtain compensation for the East India Company or to punish the tea rioters. And when he tried to call a new General Court into session in Salem, the elections produced a legislature dominated by those opposed to the Coercive Acts. In August, his attempt to convene another General Court, this time with the appointed councilors promised in the Coercive Acts, caused an outburst of popular fury such that the new councilors had to flee to Boston for their lives.
By the end of the summer, royal government had been replaced by county conventions and town meetings everywhere but in Boston. In September, the convention of Suffolk county produced the Suffolk Resolves, which denounced the Coercive Acts as unconstitutional, called for a commercial boycott of Great Britain, and urged that the colony begin to prepare for armed resistance.